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After two years of little progress in the Chargers’ bid to build support for a new home in East Village, a team of local architects is throwing out another idea: renovate the 44-year-old Qualcomm Stadium.

They said a major remodel — to modernize locker rooms and the press box, widen concourses, improve technology and add restaurants, lounges, premium seats and bathrooms — would cost only about $250 million, or one-fourth the cost of a new stadium. They also said it would preserve an important piece of local architecture and help keep the Chargers from moving to Los Angeles, as some fans worry will happen.

The architects have a vision but no drawings, a new manifesto but not the support of the team. Yet they hold out hope.

That’s in part because they speak for a broad constituency. Nearly a decade into the Chargers’ search for a new facility, many San Diegans still suggest that the simplest solution is to renovate the existing stadium.

Retired architect Jack Carpenter, who is leading the local preservationists’ effort, said Qualcomm Stadium received a national design award from the American Institute of Architects after it opened in 1967 and could be a model again.

“It could be an award-winning building again if they fixed it,” he said.

But Chargers special counsel Mark Fabiani basically likens a remodel to putting lipstick on a pigskin, and last month Mayor Jerry Sanders said he wouldn’t “spin our wheels” talking about a renovation.

“Renovating the stadium is an old idea that was ruled out a long time ago,” Pudgil emailed. “We’re way past that.”

Last month, Carpenter toured Qualcomm with Gary Allen, the original stadium design architect, exploring ways to modernize it, though not how to pay for it. Allen said construction could be phased in to avoid missing any games.

“I think it just needs somebody with a lot of money to fix it up,” Allen said. “Open pocketbooks do a lot of things for you.”

Carpenter and his dozen or so architects suggest the city sell or lease part of the 122-acre Qualcomm Stadium parking lot in Mission Valley for commercial development to pay for the renovation. They also suggest building a 500- to 1,000-space garage and creating a shuttle system that could connect the stadium with other commercial garages and lots in the area on game days.

Economist Alan Nevin, a principal at London Group Realty Advisers who helped the Chargers value the 166-acre Qualcomm site when it was considering a new stadium there eight years ago, estimates selling the lot now could generate $250 million to $350 million if a single company bought a large parcel.

Any redevelopment would be complicated by the site’s location in a floodplain, extensive underground gasoline contamination from a nearby oil farm and traffic from homes and businesses in the area. Also, any sale of more than 80 acres of city land requires a public vote under the charter.

Still, historic preservationist John Eisenhart said the matter is simple.

“Twenty years from now, you can have a new stadium that will look old or an old stadium that will look new,” he said.

Fabiani said the “fatal flaw” with the plan from Carpenter’s group is “obvious for everyone to see.”

“If you sell or lease the Qualcomm parking lot to pay for the cost of the renovations, then people will have no place to park and the stadium will be unable to function for the Chargers, SDSU and college bowl games,” he said.

Fabiani also said the Chargers paid for a study in 2003 that concluded renovating Qualcomm Stadium “made no financial sense.” That study by architecture firm HOK concluded that renovating Qualcomm would cost $353 million while building a new stadium would cost only $10 million more.

Without “new and compelling evidence to the contrary,” Fabiani said, “there is no reason for us, at this late date, to be revisiting this issue and diverting energy and resources from the downtown San Diego stadium proposal.”

That opposition doesn’t faze some in Carpenter’s group who first united over preserving Qualcomm Stadium toward the start of the team’s search for a new venue in 2002. Others, however, are hesitant to identify themselves publicly for fear of losing out on city contracts, Carpenter said.

The architects last publicly pushed for a renovation in 2008, but the idea never caught on as the team looked for a new home across San Diego County in cities such as Oceanside, National City, Chula Vista and Escondido.

Now that two new stadium proposals in the Los Angeles area could lure the Chargers north as early as next year, architects are making their push again.

“When we first started this, I thought that I was Don Quixote and there was a 10 percent chance (of success),” Carpenter said. “I think it’s better than 50-50 now for a couple reasons: A new stadium would cost a lot of money, and the chances are fairly high that we could lose the Chargers anyway.”

Architect Dick Bundy, a member of Carpenter’s group with an office close to Petco Park, said a downtown football stadium “would work just fine,” but his goal is to preserve Qualcomm Stadium while developing part of its lot.

Redeveloping the Mission Valley site with housing, commercial buildings and hotels was a plan the Chargers supported in 2003 and developers such as Perry Dealy backed again in 2009, but both proposals failed to gain much traction.

Finding supporters in 2011 is proving just as difficult, Bundy said.

“It is sort like banging your head against the wall,” he said. “On the other hand, this is a group of architects who is looking at it more from the outlook of the building than the politics or the economics. What we’re showing is that we can do this without a substantial public investment.”